Paul Fox Knihy

This study examines the influence of tradition in conservative German visual culture, focusing on the representation of battlefield identities from the 25th anniversary of the Franco-Prussian War in 1895 to the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. Through 40 carefully selected images from various cultural contexts, the author analyzes the complex responses in German visual culture to diverse military experiences, including regional conflicts, total war, and internal security operations. The work highlights how conservative artists, illustrators, photographers, and sculptors portrayed the inequalities of battlefield encounters and the quest for moral advantage. They created representations that embodied the ideal characteristics of the German male at war, even in defeat. This construction of an imagined martial masculinity, rooted in aggressive moral superiority, laid the groundwork for envisioning Germany's resurgence as a military power in Central Europe post-1918. This volume is essential for historians interested in cultural history, modern Germany, or the First World War.

The essays in this revised and expanded volume explore a variety of structuring taxonomies, the relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the artists in the genre are as varied as the interests of the period in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, aesthetics, medicine, and the paranormal. But the formalizing tendencies of investigative process remain, and it is this adherence, in artist and detective alike, to seeing crime and its resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on disorder that is under examination.

This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society`s moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.